Harvard’s Computer Science Course to be Offered at Oxford this Fall

Study in UK: Harvard's flagship introductory course CS 50 is now going to be offered at Oxford University this Fall.

Study Abroad: From this October, Oxford University is going to offer its own version of Harvard's Computer Science 50 course. This course at Harvard is taught by David J. Malan ’99.

To offer this course, Oxford has joined hands with Yale University because Yale has the experience of running a full-scale course on Computer Science since 2015. They have offered courses during office hours, in-person and provided teaching assistants.

As per the Oxford University's website, “material originally developed by Harvard has been modified to fit the Oxford system.”

The Oxford Program will run as a smaller online course for local adults as the university lacks a “tradition of undergraduate electives” typical of an American university, said the university, as reported by The Harvard Crimson.

Tom Crawford — a lecturer in Mathematics at Oxford said, "Malan slid into my DMs back in November, December of last year, just to basically be like ‘your math videos are very fun. He just, as one educator to another, very kindly, just wanted to say, ‘This is great.’"

"In addition to CS50’s lectures — available online through the Harvard-founded website EdX — Oxford will be “offering this immersive, interactive, scheduled live session every week, for two hours,” according to Wilson," said the Harvard Crimson statement.

Daniel J. Wilson, an administrator at the DCE said, “Hopefully that's going to actually be something that works for both students and works for us as educators. And maybe it's a model that we'll move more towards in the future."

Malan expressed excitement to work with professors from other universities

“There's long been a tradition of faculty collaborating on research outside the classroom, but less so on education inside the classroom. We hope that this collaboration will further signal that more of higher education could and should be collaborating so,” Malan added.

Harvard University sees drop in black freshman enrollment

After the US Supreme Court judgment released recently that colleges can not use race as a selecting factor for admissions, the Ivy League college has reported a drop in black freshman enrollment. This year, enrollment is only 14% compared to 18% last year.

Hopi Hoekstra, the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences said, "The change in law did not change our fundamental commitment. We will continue to work tirelessly to pull down barriers to a Harvard education and, in compliance with the law, to deepen our commitment to broad-based diversity even further," as reported by TOI.

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